Recently I’ve tried to teach the Iraqi developers about the ASP.NET GridView, and how easy it makes displaying and editing multiple records. Unfortunately, we’ve had a helluva time making it work with MySQL.

First, we were using the ODBC.Net ADO.NET provider, and the 3.52 MySQL ODBC driver. This works fine, except the MySQL ODBC driver doesn’t support Unicode, a minor detail which means Arabic script is turned into garbage en route to the database! Supposedly, Unicode support is coming in the next version of the driver, discontinuously numbered ‘5.0’, which has been in development for over 1.5 years and is still in alpha; I was unable to get it to even install on my laptop without cryptic errors about missing files.